I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:

• Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
• A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
• A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
• Quick to set up
• Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.

Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.

Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.

Steps:

1. Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
2. Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
3. Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
4. Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
5. Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
6. 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
7. Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
8. Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.

So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!

Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.

First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees . You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)

Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit

Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.

So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know

(well pounds as I am writing from the uk, but you get the idea.) If you had the right data you could log into the CIA network. If you had the right data you could bring down ebay. If you had the right data you could email everyone in the world? But where’s the line - what data constitutes a waste of hard disk space - a pointless entry?

You could quite easily watch every aspect of a users session on your website, in fact I am fairly sure using AJAX you could record every mouse movement when on the site, but to draw the line isn’t easy. I personally stick with google analytics, hit tail and my personal coding. Knowing the percentage of users that have javascript installed is a good example of good data, knowing how many of them are using internet explorer over firefox - also good data, but thier ip irrelevant of use - not so useful.

The conversation about what constitutes worthwhile data is an extremely relevant point, as technically it can make money or loose money. Popular blogs with good content updated often (new, steady datastream) are usually the more successful.

However at this point I look at data specific to the creation of Microsites.

Perhaps a bit early in the runnings I would like to explain a project I instigated last week. The concept of microsites is not a new one, the idea being that you create a site irrelevant to your base site, aimed at a niche or long tail phrase that either acts to increase your linking in the sector or work or to work as a secondary to your web presence.

Anyway If you have the right data you can feed thousands of pages with unique content and hopefully establish a microsite that both provides a modest income in the form of adsense ( or similar ) revenue and provide good linkage too.

So heres the process:

1. Register a hosting account elsewhere to your normal provider - (different class ip is the start of your google hiding tricks)
2. Register a good domain with your keywords in it - e.g. cheap-wheel-nuts.com if you are a wheel nut seller. Obviously they might have all been taken but just try and get your key words in there - use typo’s if very popular topic.
3. Find data - There are lots of ways to get data - depending on your market it might be a bit difficult, but as I have found out alot of industries have industry bodies and other third parties that have legal requirement to provide database data for public use. Another way is potentially to use data protection act to aquire data. - The key is the data hasnt been mass published before. - The more entries the better. The two examples I found with relative ease had 3150 entries and 43000 entries respectively, on each entry there was 5 - 25 fields, plenty to feed pages.
4. Build a site using dreamweaver or something simple. Keep it all simple. Basically make a 1 page template that provides a slot for adsense and linkage to your main site - then maybe 1 header image and a main space for content.
5. Build your content into the pages dynamically, combining clever php and .htaccess mod re-write.
6. Install pagex (a module i am developing - is in alpha), hit tail and google analytics (if you want), google adsense for ad revenue.
7. By using a max of 10 dynamic pages you should have a small battle ready site. - Next use a crawler to make a google sitemap, and using a new google account tell google about the sitemap.
8. Make sure the pages are optimised, use completly long tail titles that are absolutly unique between pages.

I am keeping a bit hush hush about this because I am still testing it. Whether or not the data is suffiently different enough to everything else that google wont disallow it, or what we will see. The data which I have used for my example has 43000 entries, is uk based and is distributed as a legal requirement of the industry. Each line of the 43000 has 20+ fields of data which effectively act as unique information.

Grand total of pages when put together 70000+ pages. Spam you thinking? I don’t agree with Spam in any form, but with this example it isn’t. The information is actually really useful and although its a long way of doing it, it does act as a service. Although a simple search could have been done using only 2 pages, this way does the same but gives me 69998 more unique pages.

In total thats 4 unique pages, 3.5 hours work, roughly £45 in registration/hosting fees but potentially 70000 niche pages, lets just hope google doesnt black list it as spam!

Too be continued….